In a Good Cause: Alliance for the Great Lakes

[mrissa]

Every week between now and the election–thankfully not that many weeks left–I’m posting about a charity. This week’s is Alliance for the Great Lakes. (WordPress has been weird about dropping my links when I publish posts, so I’m going to write out the URL here even though it’s awkward: https://greatlakes.org.)

Those of you who know me know what a major spot Lake Superior has in my heart, but they’re all pretty great. (It says so right in the name!) And they’re also really significant for the water health of North America. Alliance for the Great Lakes scores very high on all the charity raters for how much of their money goes to their mission instead of overhead and gladhanding. The eastern Great Lakes are a stellar example of a place where making an effort to clean up our act as a species has made a significant difference in my lifetime, and we want to keep Lake Superior awesome rather than letting it get awful and having to clean it back up again. Safe swimming in Lake Michigan for fish and nieces! Support our Great Lakes!

Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Charities and funders are both terribly hamstrung by this notion that donations should go to mission and not to overhead. Keeping the lights on is a crucially important part of the operation of any charity, and funders should be proud and eager to fund general operating expenses, or "gen ops."

There are notably crappy charities that abuse anyone's reasonable standard here, but I would never expect you to support any such. I urge you not to make the point that funding gen ops over mission is a bad idea. It isn't.

That said, thanks for the pointer to the Alliance. I had not heard of that organizations, and my roots are deep in Great Lakes waters.

K.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

Posted link on FB.

I really miss Superior. I hope to reconnect sometime.